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(“Still Life With Skulls” by Max Beckmann painted in 1945) Irony has its targets. More often than not, irony looks to simply do damage to its target so as to throw it into question. Sarcasm, however, looks to do more than damage. As the most extreme form of irony, sarcasm looks to destroy its target. […]

One can tell a lot about an author by virtue of things that he or she mentions and highlights in his or her writings. Charles Baudelaire, a poet and an incredibly talented prose writer, was fully aware of what is at stake in an essay. And he knew full well that the final “notes” of […]

As we move more and more into the fluid world of social networking, we see more people inside of academia make claims that are daring and attention-grabbing. One such claim is made at the end of Adam Kotsko’s Awkwardness. After discussing different kinds of awkwardness that we see in popular culture in the first few […]

The movement from blindness to insight is a time honored theme. It has its roots in early Christianity and in the Enlightenment it becomes a guiding principle. The Christian appropriation of blindness is fascinating. In Corinthians 2 (3:14-16), Paul associates blindness with the Jews and sight with the Christians: Therefore, since we have such hope, […]

There’s nothing like a simple sentence and a simple message. And then again, some people love to be obtuse. When we let them, some people just don’t know when to stop. People like to yap; especially academics. Once in a while, I dare myself to open up a book from the 1990s by this or […]

Charles Baudelaire, in his essay “Some Foreign Caricatures,” distinguishes between a “historical” and an “artistic” caricaturist. Writing on Goya, who took the horrors of the Spanish Insurrection and the war with Napoleonic France, Baudelaire notes that Goya opened up the field of caricature by introducing “fantasy” into the comic. And, in contrast to the categories […]

The “Yale School,” which included such academic personalities as Paul deMan and Harold Bloom, gave America its first taste of deconstruction. What deMan and Bloom popularized, in particular, was the rhetorical reading of texts. The point was to find, as deMan once said, their keystone (or it’s “center”). By locating it and taking it out, […]

In the beginning of The Schlemiel as Modern Hero, Ruth Wisse points out that for Rabbi Nachman the Simpleton (that is, the schlemiel) acts “as if” good will triumph over evil. In his story, “The Clever Man and the Simple Man,” the thinker looks down on the simpleton as an idiot for being so naïve. The […]

At the beginning of the summer, I had an interesting talk with the Kabbalah scholar Elliot Wolfson about Holy Fools. The subject that I wanted to discuss with him, which pertains to the Holy Fool, is something he was familiar with in his studies of Habad (Lubavitch) Hasiduth and Mysticism; namely, something called Ruah Shtut […]

The last two targeting theories I’d like to look at, before I address Emmauel Levinas, Philip Roth, and Andy Kaufman come from Charles Baudelaire and Paul deMan who, apparently, follows in Baudelaire’s comic footsteps. (I have written several blogs on Baudelaire and deMan’s reading of comedy. What I look to do here is to summarize […]